It is a matter of deep regret to some of us that the Corporative Order, something different from the Corporate State, should have become in the public mind so closely identified with Fascism. Admittedly the corporative organization of industrial life, now in process of being introduced into Italy, Germany and Austria—even in Italy it is still far from being fully developed—is based on Fascist conceptions and implemented in a Fascist spirit. What Catholics, however, should remember is that a corporative organization of industry as an alternative on the one hand to unrestricted competition and free trade and on the other to State intervention, was being discussed by social-minded Catholics on the continent at least half a century ago, long before the centralized Fascist State was dreamed of. The first gropings after the corporative formula go back as early as the days when the Marquis de La Tour du Pin and Count Albert de Mun, appalled by the horrors of the Commune, founded the Catholic Workmen’s Clubs in an attempt to counteract the class war. The immediate reputation of La Tour du Pin, the centenary of whose birth has been celebrated in France this year, was somewhat overshadowed by that of his brilliant oratorical friend, but it is now recognized that his was by far the more constructive mind of the two, and he devoted long years to elaborating a Christian social order on corporative lines, which might ultimately, in his opinion, not only regulate industrial life but replace the parliamentary system.
